xml-dev - Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>

[Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

Frank Boumphrey writes:
 > > I'd be interested in a detailed technical rebuttal of why the TEI does not
 > > already provide exactly you need.
 > 
 > We tried using it.

you tried using _what_, though? the TEI is a big library of things,
from which you can build custom DTDs for your project. If you gave
them the whole DTD, I expect they were scared. If you gave them TEI
Lite, then that is also probably too much. Let me stress that TEI Lite 
is a demonstration of how to make a working authors DTD, it is not
prescriptive

 >  Unfortunatly our volunteers found it extreamly difficult
 > to use. When I tested it on a group of 50(non-honors) students, I got
 > exactly two texts marked up over a three month period (and they were being
 > offered extra credit!).

what degree of detail did you tell them to mark up? what did the
control group use? what tools did they use?

 > OTH with more intuitive DTD's 30 volunteers have marked up 120 texts in
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
this is what I want to hear nuts and bolts about. in what sense was
the DTD they used "more intuitive"?

....
 >   For the most part these volunteers will have had no
 >   formal training in XML, SGML, or other document authoring
 >   processes. 
what software do they use? whatever takes their fancy?

 > It is therfore necessary that DTD's should
 >   be useable with only minimal formal training.

have they had training in document analysis?

 > Markup shall be intuitive.
 > ==========================
 >   Rational:
 >   This goes hand in glove with requirement 1. The element
 >   names should reflect real world structures and content.
 >   Thus <para> is preferable to <p> and <date> is preferable
 >   to <dt>.
sorry, but I don't buy this. I can't think of anyone who would use <dt> 
anyway, and <p> is VASTLY familiar to anyone who has glanced at
HTML. 

Anyway, you can, of course, change the names of TEI elements to be
whatever you want in TEI (they preserve knowledge of their original)

Sebastian


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